Company Name

20-Word Description

Kontain is a media blogging experience built for Mom and Dad to contain all of their photo, video and audio content.

CEO's Pitch

What is interesting about Kontain? Created by award-winning interactive advertising firm Fi, Kontain is out to be the prettiest girl at the ball. Kontain takes an old concept, blogging, and re-introduces it to a wider audience by focusing on ease of use and looks. This is the dream project of Fi’s founder and CEO, Irishman David Martin.

Mashable's Take

“Blogging for the masses” isn’t a new idea. Six Apart is trying to accomplish it with Vox, Automattic is attacking it with WordPress.com, and dozens of other startups have launched a wide range of other services. The general theme of these efforts seems to be dumbing things down to the point where users don’t need to think about anything from a technology perspective, but rather, can focus on putting content online in the quickest and easiest way possible.

To that extent, Kontain does an excellent job. From the big and boxey signup process to its no-frills publishing tool, Kontain is incredibly easy to use – I had my first post up within about 30 seconds of signing up. The service also makes it easy to insert photos, videos, and audio. Rather than require the user to position multimedia elements within a post, they are added separately at the top of a post, through a simple built-in uploader.

Kontain also offers a few options for getting your blog exposure – one of the main reasons most novice bloggers quickly give up. With each post, you can invite people to check it out via email . The site also offers some basic community, like showing “featured entries” on the homepage and utilizing tags to let users browse for content about specific topics.

Does all of that add up to enough for Kontain to become a significant new player in blogging? Probably not. While Kontain’s user interface is indeed pretty, and something I think just about anyone could understand, there is no killer feature that’s likely to make people sign up en masse. And, given the number of big, well-financed companies that have tried, are we at a point where we can say that Mom and Dad simply aren’t that interested in blogging? I think we might be.

Editor's Note:This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

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